'Thames: The Biography'

Ben Cosgrove

Published 4:00 am, Sunday, November 16, 2008

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TRAVEL LONDON -- St. Paul's Cathedral is visible from the new Millennium Mile walk on the south bank of the Thames through London's revitalized Southwark district. Credit: London Tourist Board. Reuse OK. Bergen, Norway, has a new bus linking downtown with the distant Fantoft Stave Church and composer Edvard Grieg's home. Ran on: 03-01-2005 The sights of London are pricey for U.S. tourists, but the British capital has put together packages to save travelers money. Ran on: 03-01-2005 Ran on: 03-01-2005 less

TRAVEL LONDON -- St. Paul's Cathedral is visible from the new Millennium Mile walk on the south bank of the Thames through London's revitalized Southwark district. Credit: London Tourist Board. Reuse OK. ... more

'Thames: The Biography'

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Thames

The Biography

Nan A. Talese; 512 pages; $40

If nothing else, Peter Ackroyd is a confident fellow. Not content to pen mere biographies of Shakespeare and the city of London - as well as Eliot, Pound, Dickens and others - Ackroyd subtitled those two major works in a way some might construe as downright cocky: "London: The Biography" and "Shakespeare: The Biography."

Happily, for his readers, Ackroyd's erudition and talent are outsize enough that employing the phrase "the biography" rather than "a biography" ultimately feels like hearty self-assurance rather than hubris. Both books elicit a "Yep, this feels like the biography, all right" response.

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With "Thames: The Biography," Ackroyd's done it again. Having tackled the mysterious, iconic Bard and ancient, ever-evolving London Town, it seems somehow apt that he would now turn to the "life" of something as necessarily elusive as a river.

But has he, finally, tried to pin down the unpindownable? In myth, in metaphor and, one might argue, in fact, a river has no beginning and no end, and embarking upon a riverine biography might feel a fool's journey. In Ackroyd's sure hands, and through his wide-open and wondering eyes, it is instead a revelation.

That said, even the revelatory can begin with false steps. In its very first paragraph, Ackroyd makes claims for the 215-mile-long Thames that are at once grand, poetic and disputable:

"The Amazon and the Mississippi cover almost 4,000 miles, and the Yangtze almost 3,500 miles; but none of them has arrested the attention of the world in the manner of the Thames."

Ackroyd spends the rest of the book in effect backing up that assertion, and the intelligence and eye, ear and nose for the telling anecdote that he brings to the task make for an eminently rewarding read. But neither the Mississippi nor the Amazon (not to mention that piddling Nile) has "arrested the attention of the world" as the Thames has? Really? Trusting to past experience with our guide, we forgive him his hyperbole and continue downstream.

And what a ride it is. As with the river itself, one can enter Ackroyd's book at almost any point and feel that here, right here, the Thames is revealed. Much of this feeling of familiarity and immediacy, of course, is the result of the author's beautiful prose. As readers of his fiction, nonfiction and criticism are well aware, Ackroyd's writing feels and sounds both thoroughly modern and somehow out of the past - hardly surprising, perhaps, for a man who has written "brief lives" of Chaucer, Newton and J.M.W. Turner, and who has explored English history through the lens of his many novels.

"There is hardly one novel or study of the river," he writes in one characteristically evocative passage, "that does not create a dream-fugue of the past. It is a backward and melancholy presence even in London itself where, on a dark night by the banks of the Thames, it is possible to re-create the shapes of the older city looming beside the river. The river is the oldest thing in London, and it changes not at all."

The notion of the ancient immutability of the Thames is a constant throughout, from the early chapters devoted to the river's source in the idyllic Gloucestershire countryside, to its passage through Oxford, Abingdon, Reading, Windsor, Maidenhead and London itself, after which it flows to the North Sea.

Ackroyd, who has often written and spoken of locales imbued with a "spirit of place," lingers here in that transitional realm - the mist-shrouded Kentish marshes where Pip first encounters Magwitch in "Great Expectations" - as if hesitant to let his subject go. When the author finally concludes what he calls his "song of the Thames," the reader might be forgiven for looking up from these wonderful pages with eyes squinting just a bit against the memory of cloud-filtered sunlight playing on waves.